by JULIET WATERS

Haiti's notoriously vicious Duvalier-era police are better known as Les Tonton Macoutes, but they had another name: the dew breakers. "They'd break into your house. Mostly it was at night. But often they'd also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they'd take you away," we are told in Edwidge Danticat's recently released novel. The quiet, subtle horror of that image is the perfect testament to the mystery of Haiti, a country that seems to be both simultaneously one of the most desperate, and the most fiercely creative places on earth.

Danticat, who'll be in Montreal for the Blue Metropolis literary festival, moved to Brooklyn from Haiti when she was 12. She's now 34, but if you knew nothing about the author, you'd have no way of knowing whether this novel was written by an elderly torture victim, a young sculptor, a drug addict recently let out of jail after killing his father, a man living in the Brooklyn basement of the man who set fire to his house and killed his family, or perhaps even a reformed and aging torturer. Her voice is that unpretentious and yet so powerful that at a relatively young age she is already a National Book Award nominee, an American Book Award winner, and the natural and obvious successor to Toni Morrison.

Told as a series of interconnected stories, the novel centres around a dew breaker who is now living in Brooklyn and has transformed himself into a quiet, gentle man, devoted father and husband. His daughter, born in Brooklyn, is on the verge of becoming a successful artist, having just sold a sculpture to a Hollywood star with Haitian roots. The sculpture is a representation of her father as she imagines him in prison, erroneously believing all her life that he had been an inmate, not a guard. Before she is able to deliver it, her father throws the sculpture in the lake, and then tells her the truth.

Each subsequent story seems to cast a different light on this incident. Is it an act of atonement, manipulation, or self preservation? Though he has never formally been brought to justice, he has paid a price for his past, having lived an extremely isolated life, wary for good reason of ever befriending anyone in the Haitian community. All he has is his family, so he has a good motive to undermine her success, not to mention the fact that it threatens his anonymity. At the same time, in telling her the truth, is he authentically trying to let her go, more so than he would be if he allowed her to base her life and career on a lie?

His daughter, however, is not the only one who has been deceived. The dew breaker has lived decades in Brooklyn believing that he has escaped recognition. He hasn't. He seems to be surrounded by victims who know him, yet for mysterious reasons are doing nothing. Slowly, steadily, the novel reveals members of a community who seem impossibly frozen in grief - desperate to move on, yet endlessly dragged back to the past. One of the dew breaker's victims, an elderly bridal seamstress, explains her secret of life to a young journalist. "I always take my time." In not taking revenge on the torturer, who for many years has always lived down the street, is she taking her time in forgetting, or has she just been waiting for the perfect opportunity for revenge, which she now has?

There's no doubt from the quality of this short but exceptional book that Edwidge Danticat takes her time. Paradoxically, this is probably what has made her, in such a relatively short time, one of the foremost contemporary writers in the world.

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat, Knopf, hc, 244pp, $32. Edwidge Danticat will be participating in the Blue Metropolis Festival, between March 31 and April 4